


anybody else would be long gone

by firstaudrina



Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2019-02-22 19:38:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13173798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: "I don't know what kind of life I want," Serena confesses. "All I know if that I don't like any of the ones I try."





	anybody else would be long gone

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [ this post on tumblr](http://nobodysflower.tumblr.com/post/116610061228/different-kinds-of-tired-1-all-day-at-the-beach). It lent the fic its structure.

Beaches are a Carter place, up until the point Serena leans her head against Dan Humphrey under the fireworks one Hamptons summer. But before that, beaches are a place she always goes with Carter – never fancy ones, never the type Blair likes, not resort beaches with white sand and clear water. Carter takes Serena to Rockaway and Asbury Park, up to Montauk in the winter. Regular beaches crowded with regular people, or lonely with icy wind in the off-season.

Carter scoops her up before the end of the school day, to Blair's eternal irritation and Nate's quiet envy, giving her no more than ten minute's notice via text. Serena takes to keeping a bikini in her locker all through sophomore year. Carter waits for her by the school gate, her skulking bad boy non-boyfriend, chain-smoking in his leather jacket. "He's a cliché," Blair sneers.

"So's everybody," Serena replies flippantly, but she doesn't really think of people like that, not how Blair does. Blair likes everyone to fit their movie counterpart: princess, jock, basketcase. Serena likes to let people surprise her.

With Carter she descends into the subway and gets on the train, which she never takes unless she's with him. He dodges the fare if he's got no money that day, telling her to cause a distraction with a wink as he hops over the turnstile. He never pays for Serena, which she kind of likes; she has to pay for him a lot, and she doesn't mind that. Carter is always getting cut off by his parents but he does what he can, he buys her pretzels and slushies and ice cream cones, he swipes little trinkets for her, puka shell bracelets and hemp necklaces. Boardwalk nonsense.

He gives her drugs, too.

In the warmer months they dive into the waves. Carter picks her up and throws her into the ocean, Serena shrieking. They drag each other under the water and emerge dripping, laughing. In the winter they huddle on the sand, shivering together. Carter tells her about all his plans to get out of New York City, forceful with hope, brittle with it.

Right before he leaves for good (he comes back, but no return will ever be more than temporary), he takes one of his rings off and puts it on her. It's a chunky silver skull with blacked out eyes. "To remember me by, beautiful," he says.

But she was never worried about forgetting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carter is the only person Serena can stand to see her in pieces. She's not sure why that is, except that that's how they found each other, two people carefully glued together but with so many visible seams. She goes to Carter when things are bad. He never cares that she's not the girl in the picture with the hair and the smile. Carter knows what it's like to be poison inside too.

It usually works out that they're not off the deep end at the same time, some kind of weird luck. She never gets Carter at his worst but she's seen the aftermath – his glassy eyes, his bruises, the rambling that never makes sense. He keeps the most toxic part of himself private, so she's never privy to the events that have brought him to that level, spilled his pain out all over everything, but she's been there herself enough times that she can imagine. When she's like that, Carter gets suddenly very responsible, very adult. He cleans her up and gives her water, gives her something to make her sleep, makes her food when she wakes up and rubs her back when she vomits. She wishes he'd let her take care of him once in a while.

"You wouldn't like me like that," he says. "I don't like me like that."

They're looking for her father. Carter is clean, for now. Serena is doing a lot of things for attention. She's drunk now, having this conversation; she spent her evening doing tequila shots with supermodels and she's giggling even as Carter tries to be serious. She leans up to kiss the very tip of his nose. "I like you all the time," she says.

He smiles a little but his eyes are cold, cold, cold. "You don't see me all the time."

She gets sick that summer, actual sick and not hungover sick. She feels made of glass, breakable bones and sugar-spun insides. Her eyelids hurt. Everything hurts. She gets a fever; nausea riles through her; it's like there's a knife buried in her skull. She gets sick-crazed and panicky about it, nervous and crying and wanting Blair, because her mother was never the one to take care of her when she was sick.

Carter is cool and patient. He goes to the pharmacy to get over the counter medicine for her in garbled half-fluent Greek, comes back singing the praises of foreign pharmacies. He lets her snuggle into his side when she's cold or push him away when she's feverish; he keeps the TV on, narrating and occasionally translating Greek talent shows or cartoons. By the end of the week she's mostly okay again, just a little tender. She can't stop looking at him with soft, soft eyes.

"Now, see, this is why you can't play nurse with somebody," Carter says sternly, but his eyes are grinning. "Do you think I should get the little white outfit?"

"Uh-huh, it'd look good on you, great legs," Serena says.

"Oh, beautiful, you flatter me," he says, dramatic, with his hand on his heart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Serena calls Carter when her marriage goes belly-up. Though to be honest, she'd called him long before the official diagnosis was set; he was one of the symptoms of her divorce.

Serena's not a teenager anymore but she doesn't feel much like an adult either. She's not even thirty but she's already an ex-wife, and all she can think about is that by this time her mother was already on her fourth husband. The mind reels. Serena still feels too young for responsibility.

She calls Carter and Carter says, "You know I've never seen this great nation with my own two eyes?"

Carter always had something of a Kerouac boner (Dan too; Serena sure knows how to pick 'em) so they rent a car and set out that way. Serena never learned how to drive so Carter teaches her once they get out to the empty highways and dusty roads, laughing at her pre-drive jumpiness and proud when she proves herself a natural. They alternate behind the wheel and Serena grows to love the gentle buzzy rumble of the car underneath her, rocking her to sleep. She sleeps with a sweater balled up under her head and her cheek pressed against the cool window, landscapes zipping across outside like spin art.

The radio always plays, podcasts and audiobooks and bands she's never heard before.

Days and nights become slow and meaningless, marked more by when she sleeps and doesn't than the sun or the moon. They get hotel rooms when they're too tired, but mostly they drive. Mostly they check out national monuments, parks, important landmarks of history. "Fuck if I know what any of it means," Carter says with a shrug, and gets back in the car.

Serena is adamant that they stay in no tell motels instead of five star joints just because she thinks it fits the aesthetic of the journey better. That's Carter's style, so he doesn't care. They each sleep on their own full-sized bed with uncomfortable blankets, and even after they fuck Serena slips out and into her own bed, luxuriating in her aloneness after years of sleeping beside someone.

"I don't know what kind of life I want," Serena confesses. "All I know if that I don't like any of the ones I try."

"At least you try," Carter says. He doesn't smoke anymore. She hadn't realized how much of his composure had been wrapped up in one bad habit, because without cigarettes to occupy his hands and punctuate his sentences, he's fidgety and impatient. His fingers are always tapping, fiddling with his bracelets. She remembers he was made to learn the violin when they were children but he always hated it, smashed his sometime in a fit of teenage rebellion. He could use something to occupy his hands. "I think I'm living on a loop. I just do the same things over and over."

"What do you think would be different?"

Carter thinks about it. "Staying," he guesses. "Being a person. Being normal. But I can't do that." He doesn't say can't like _won't_ ; he says can't like _am not capable_.

"I don't know if I can either," Serena says.

He gives her one of his rakish grins, the ones that are all surface. "Looks like we're two of a kind then, huh, beautiful?"

She wonders if he'll still call her that when they're very old. "Yeah," she says, half-smiling. "Looks like we are."


End file.
